As AI becomes part of everyday life, it brings a hidden climate cost
[August 25, 2025] By
CALEIGH WELLS
Marissa Loewen first started using artificial intelligence in 2014 as a
project management tool. She has autism and ADHD and said it helped
immensely with organizing her thoughts.
“We try to use it conscientiously though because we do realize that
there is an impact on the environment,” she said.
Her personal AI use isn't unique anymore. Now it’s a feature in
smartphones, search engines, word processors and email services. Every
time someone uses AI, it uses energy that is often generated by fossil
fuels. That releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and
contributes to climate change.
And it's getting harder to live without it.
The climate cost
AI is largely powered by data centers that field queries, store data and
deploy information. As AI becomes ubiquitous, the power demand for data
centers increases, leading to grid reliability problems for people
living nearby.
“Since we are trying to build data centers at a pace where we cannot
integrate more renewable energy resources into the grid, most of the new
data centers are being powered by fossil fuels,” said Noman Bashir,
computing and climate impact fellow with MIT's Climate and
Sustainability Consortium.
The data centers also generate heat, so they rely on fresh water to stay
cool. Larger centers can consume up to 5 million gallons (18.9 million
liters) a day, according to an article from the Environmental and Energy
Study Institute. That's roughly the same as the daily water demand for a
town of up to 50,000 people.
It’s difficult to imagine, because for most users the impact isn’t
visible, said AI and Climate Lead Sasha Luccioni with the AI company,
Hugging Face.
“In one of my studies, we found that generating a high-definition image
uses as much energy as charging half of your phone. And people were
like, ‘That can’t be right, because when I use Midjourney (a generative
AI program), my phone battery doesn’t go down,’” she said.
Jon Ippolito, professor of new media at the University of Maine, said
tech companies are constantly working to make chips and data centers
more efficient, but that does not mean AI’s environmental impact will
shrink. That’s because of a problem called the Jevons Paradox.
“The cheaper resources get, the more we tend to use them anyway,” he
said. When cars replaced horses, he said, commute times didn’t shrink.
We just traveled farther.
Quantifying AI's footprint
How much those programs contribute to global warming depends on a lot of
factors, including how warm it is outside the data center that's
processing the query, how clean the grid is and how complex the AI task
is.
Information sources on AI's contributions to climate change are
incomplete and contradictory, so getting exact numbers is difficult.
But Ippolito tried anyway.
He built an app that compares the environmental footprint of different
digital tasks based on the limited data he could find. It estimates that
a simple AI prompt, such as, “Tell me the capital of France,” uses 23
times more energy than the same question typed into Google without its
AI Overview feature.
“Instead of working with existing materials, it's writing them from
scratch. And that takes a lot more compute,” Luccioni said.
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A data center owned by Amazon Web Services, front right, is under
construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick,
Pa., on Jan. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, file)
 And that's just for a simple prompt.
A complex prompt, such as, “Tell me the number of gummy bears that
could fit in the Pacific Ocean,” uses 210 times more energy than the
AI-free Google search. A 3-second video, according to Ippolito's
app, uses 15,000 times as much energy. It's equivalent to turning on
an incandescent lightbulb and leaving it on for more than a year.
It's got a big impact, but it doesn't mean our tech footprints were
carbon-free before AI entered the scene.
Watching an hour of Netflix, for example, uses more energy than a
complex AI text prompt. An hour on Zoom with 10 people uses 10 times
that much.
“It's not just about making people conscious of AI's impact, but
also all of these digital activities we take for granted,” he said.
Limit tech, limit tech's climate impact
Ippolito said he limits his use of AI when he can. He suggests using
human-captured images instead of AI-generated ones. He tells the AI
to stop generating as soon as he has the answer to avoid wasting
extra energy. He requests concise answers and he begins Google
searches by typing “-ai” so it doesn't provide an AI overview for
queries where he doesn't need it.
Loewen has adopted the same approach. She said she tries to organize
her thoughts into one AI query instead of asking it a series of
iterative questions. She also built her own AI that doesn’t rely on
large data centers, which saves energy in the same way watching a
movie you own on a DVD is far less taxing than streaming one.
“Having something local on your computer in your home allows you to
also control your use of the electricity and consumption. It allows
you to control your data a little bit more,” she said.
Luccioni uses Ecosia, which is a search engine that uses efficient
algorithms and uses profits to plant trees to minimize the impact of
each search. Its AI function can also be turned off.
ChatGPT also has a temporary chat function so the queries you send
to the data center get deleted after a few weeks instead of taking
up data center storage space.
But AI is only taking up a fraction of the data center's energy use.
Ippolito estimates roughly 85% is data collection from sites like
TikTok and Instagram, and cryptocurrency.
His answer there: make use of screen time restrictions on your phone
to limit time scrolling on social media. Less time means less
personal data collected, less energy and water used, and fewer
carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.
“If you can do anything that cuts a data center out of the equation,
I think that's a win,” Ippolito said.
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